The Probable Future

by Alice Hoffman

  Most importantly, no outsider was ever to be shown anything that had belonged to Rebecca Sparrow. Those busybodies over at the library, who were always begging for a trinket or a scrap of cloth for their history of Unity displays, were never allowed past the front door. But of course this day was different from all the rest, and this visitor was different as well. Had Jenny been hypnotized by Will Avery’s dream? Is that what convinced her to bring him over to the far corner of the parlor where the relics were kept? Was it love that caused her to reveal her family’s most treasured possessions, or was it only spring fever, all that filmy green light so thick with pollen, those peepers in the muddy shallows of the lake with their dreamy chorus, calling as if the world were beginning and ending at the very same time.

  Along with everyone else in town, Will Avery wanted to see exactly what Jenny herself had always done her best to ignore, what she’d branded the Sparrows’ own private and personal museum of pain. What family was foolish enough to keep the things that had hurt them most of all? The Sparrows, that was who, although Elinor and Jenny did their best to ignore that pain. The corner where the display was kept was dusty and neglected. There were oak bookshelves lining the wall, but the leather-bound books had been un-tended for decades, the seashells that had once been pink had turned gray with age, the hand-carved models of bees and wasps had been attacked by carpenter ants, so that the wood fell to sawdust when touched. Only the glass case had been protected, kept well out of harm’s way.

  Jenny snatched off the embroidered coverlet, meant to safeguard the family heirlooms from sunlight and ruin. When he saw what was before him, Will gulped down a mouthful of air, for once in his life at a loss for words. What he’d always assumed was nothing more than rumor was indeed quite real. Now he’d have a story to tell. He started to grin right then, right there. Now they’d all be gathering around him on Monday, and if they didn’t believe what he told them about Rebecca Sparrow, at least he himself would know it was true.

  He leaned forward, affected in some way he didn’t understand, almost as if he’d had a heart. There in the glass case before him were the ten arrowheads people talked about, handed down through the generations, preserved under glass, much the way another family might document their history with photographs or newspaper announcements of weddings and births. Against a field of satin, fading from red to pink, but carefully arranged, were three more pieces of the Sparrow archives: a silver compass, a tarnished bell, and what Will thought at first was a coiled snake, but which was, in point of fact, a plait of dark, braided hair.

  Still, it was the arrowheads that kept Will’s attention; they were handmade, filed out of the local stone. Each one had a line of blood at the tip. Whether these mementos had been kept as proof of human cruelty or human frailty was uncertain. All that was known was what a farmer named Hathaway had written of his own experience in his journal, indexed in the historical records room at the library on Main Street. Hathaway had gone down to the docks to retrieve a mirror, an extremely expensive gift for his wife, in the time when the marshes were still a deep harbor, not yet filled in by mud and silt. But after claiming his treasure, ordered a year earlier and all that time at sea, Hathaway had stumbled over the roots of a twisted swamp ash; before he had time to steady his hold, the mirror had fallen and broken into a hundred bright pieces. Hathaway had stood there for a very long time, wondering how he would explain himself to his wife; he stayed so long, in fact, that he’d been the only witness when Rebecca Sparrow walked over the broken glass, her arms piled high with laundry, barefoot and bleeding, but not uttering a single cry.

  As soon as the boys on the farms around Unity discovered that Rebecca Sparrow could not feel pain, they began to shoot at her with arrows, for sport. They tracked her as they would a pheasant or a deer, relentlessly, forsaking the rules of charity. They cheerfully took aim whenever they came upon her at the far end of Hourglass Lake, where she took in laundry from the wives in town who could afford to send dirty homespun and linens out to be washed by someone whose hands were already burned from lye. Several of these boys left behind guilt-ridden letters, now in the Unity library, documenting the fact that their target never once flinched. Rebecca only slapped at herself, as though fending off mosquitoes; she kept to her work, washing the woolen laundry with the strongest soap, made out of ashes and fat, carefully soaking the delicate silks in green tea. She didn’t notice when she’d been struck, not until she went home and undressed. Only then did she discover she’d been wounded by one of their arrowheads. She had no idea she’d been hurt until she traced a finger over the trail of blood that had been left behind.

  WAS IT ANY WONDER that Jenny was so apprehensive as her daughter’s thirteenth birthday drew near? She so dreaded the day she had already bitten her nails down to the quick, a girlhood habit that reappeared in trying times. Perhaps others forgot their own histories, but Jenny remembered hers only too well. She remembered racing across the cool, dewy grass as though it had happened hours ago. She could instantly bring to mind the trill of the peepers and the way her heart had felt, thumping against her chest as she and Will stood in the parlor, examining the memento case. It was this memory that caused Jenny to stay up all night long on the eve of Stella’s birthday, perched on a chair beside the bed as her daughter slept. It was the fact that thirteen had been reached yet again that left Jenny’s dark hair in knots, her complexion ashen, her nails bitten until her fingertips bled.

  Let her wake as she was when she closed her eyes. That was all Jenny asked for. That was all she begged for on this March night that was perfectly equal to the day, unique in all the season. Let her be the same sweet girl, unburdened by gifts or sorrow.

  There they were, the guarded and the guardian, but it was impossible to ward off time, no matter how vigilant or alert an individual might be. Jenny knew the hour had come when she heard the morning traffic echo on Commonwealth Avenue and Storrow Drive. Blink and the years passed right by you. Turn around twice and you were walking in the land of the future. Daylight was breaking over Marlborough Street, and it would continue to do so even if Jenny kept the curtains drawn and the door bolted shut. Newspapers were being delivered, trash was collected in the alleyways, pigeons were cooing on windowsills and telephone lines. The day had begun, cool and clear and absolutely impossible to avoid.

  Stella opened her eyes to see her mother staring at her. Always a sign of trouble, to have your mother huddled over you, watchful as a bulldog with all those knots in her hair. Always a bad start to a day, birthday or not. Stella leaned up on her elbows, her eyes rimmed with sleep dust. She hadn’t bothered to unbraid her hair and now a halo of stray bits stuck up from her scalp. All night she had dreamed of dark water, and now she blinked in the sharp morning light.

  “What are you doing here?” Stella’s voice was still dream-infected. Jenny understood why the words sounded liquid; she had dozed off and caught a bit of her daughter’s dream, and it brought her little comfort. Jenny Sparrow knew precisely where the water was darkest, where it never seemed to end, and so she’d drunk coffee and cola and kept alert. “What are you looking at?” Stella asked when her mother didn’t respond, annoyance creeping into her voice.

  How was Jenny to explain when she herself didn’t know? She was searching for a sign of something burning up inside her little star, that was all. An ability that was bound to set her apart, just as surely as if she were a giantess, or a girl who ate fire, or a woman who could walk over glass without feeling the slightest bit of pain.

  “I just wanted to know what you wanted for your birthday breakfast. French toast? Waffles? Eggs over easy? I’ve got raisin bread. The kind with the walnuts.”

  If it had to happen, let it be something simple and helpful, the ability to mend clothes with a single stitch, perhaps, or a talent for trigonometry. Let it be an aptitude for foreign languages, or an open heart, or a resilient nature. If worse came to worst, perhaps she could see in the dark, always a welcome attribute, or quiet wild do
gs with a mere gesture.

  “I don’t eat breakfast anymore. For your information. And I can’t be late. I have a math test first period and Miss Hewitt doesn’t care about birthdays. She doesn’t care about anything but algebra.” Stella had tumbled out of bed and immediately began to search through a rumpled pile of clothes on the floor.

  “Would you like me to iron that?” Jenny asked when Stella’s disheveled school uniform had at last been unearthed and pulled from the tangle of jeans and underclothes.

  Stella eyed her uniform, then shook out the blue skirt and blazer. “There,” she said, with the hot edge of defiance that had surfaced at the start of ninth grade. Stella had skipped a year of school, passing directly from fourth to sixth grade. She’d been so quick, such a good reader, naturally they’d been proud of her abilities. But now Jenny wondered if they hadn’t made a mistake, if Stella hadn’t somehow been rushed into something she wasn’t ready for.

  “All better,” Stella said of her clothes. As she turned, she caught her mother staring at her. Yet again, and this time with a sour expression, as though in studying her daughter, Jenny had happened upon head lice or fleas. “Is there something wrong with me? Is that why you keep looking at me that way?”

  “Of course not.” At least there was no green light, no calling frogs, no fork in the road that would surely lead to disaster. “Although you might want to brush your hair.”

  Stella peered at herself in the mirror. Too tall, too thin, with teeth that weren’t quite crooked enough for braces and hair that looked like straw left out too long in the rain. She scowled at her own reflection, then turned to face her mother, still defiant. “My hair’s fine the way it is, thank you.”

  Last night, Jenny had counted backward through time until she reached Rebecca Sparrow, the lost girl who was their first recorded blood relation. Stella, she’d realized, was the thirteenth generation in their history. That ominous, unlucky number. Why, some people wouldn’t keep thirteen dollars in their pocket, some architects passed directly from the twelfth to the fourteenth floors, insuring that no elevators would stop at that ill-fated destination. And now here Stella was for an entire year, stuck with that number, trapped by her own destiny. Thirteen, no matter how the years were counted. Thirteen, until the next twelve months had passed.

  “How about a present?” Jenny brought forth a gift box. She had shopped carefully, trying to pick something Stella might like, but such an endeavor was hopeless. Jenny wasn’t surprised at the disappointment that showed on Stella’s face as soon as the cashmere sweater she’d chosen had been unwrapped.

  “Pink?” Stella said.

  Nothing Jenny did seemed right; that was the only thing they could agree upon lately.

  “Do you even know me?” Stella carefully folded the sweater back into its box. True enough, everything in Stella’s closet was black, navy blue, or white.

  Something had begun to go wrong between mother and daughter around the time Will left last summer, or maybe it had begun in those last few months of their marriage, when all Will and Jenny could do was fight. They had sunk so low that Jenny had flung a glass of milk at Will after finding a woman’s phone number in his jacket pocket. He’d responded by smashing her favorite platter on the floor. They’d stopped to look at each other then, panting, surrounded by broken crockery and white puddles of milk. Then and there, they knew the marriage was over.

  Will had packed up that night. He’d gone off, even though Stella had tried her best to hold him back. She’d begged him to stay, and when he wouldn’t, she ran to the window to watch as he waited for a cab.

  “He won’t go,” Stella had whispered hopefully, but hope faded when the taxi pulled up. When it was clear Will was leaving, as it should have been for several years, Stella turned on Jenny. “Call him back.” Stella’s voice was perilously high. “Don’t let him go!”

  But Will was already gone, and he had been for ages. Jenny thought about the day when she saw him on the lawn; his dream had been her first taste of desire. But no matter how many nights they had spent together since, she had never again been granted access to his dreams. She was quick to pick up her landlady’s dreams, and the dreams of her neighbors; such things came to her unbidden, eclipsing what dreams she might have had on her own. There were the overheated sex dreams of the young man on the first floor, so feverish, Jenny had trouble looking him in the eye when they met by chance at the incinerator. There were the cool, spare dreams of the old woman at the end of the hall, images of Nile-blue landscapes from half a century earlier that always refreshed Jenny, even when she’d been standing on her feet at work all day. Walking through the Boston Common, she’d been privy to bits and pieces of the dreams of homeless men who dozed on the benches, dreams of warm woolen coats and turkey dinners, dreams of everything these men had lost, and everything that had been stolen from them, and all that they’d thrown away.

  And, yet, with her own husband, there was only emptiness, the blank space of an individual who could fall into slumber without a single thought, without a care in the world. Dreams as empty as Marlborough Street after he’d gotten into the cab on the evening he left, dark as the brown twilight of Boston that always fell so quickly, like a curtain drawn across window glass.

  “I hate you,” Stella had said that night. She’d gone into her room and closed the door and it had been that way ever since, much like the closed doors of Jenny’s childhood, only in reverse. Her mother then, her daughter now. Even today, on her birthday, Stella didn’t want Jenny near.

  “Do you mind if I get dressed, or do you have to watch me do that, too?” Stella had her hands on her hips, as though she were speaking to an intrusive maid who couldn’t follow instructions, a poor fool she had to put up with until the day when she was finally all grown up and free.

  Jenny went into the kitchen, where she fixed herself a cup of coffee, then warmed a corn muffin for Stella. Jenny was of the belief that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, no matter what Stella might say.

  “I’m just fixing you a bite,” Jenny called when she heard Stella moving about in the hallway. “Just to keep your energy up.”

  Jenny grabbed the muffin and a tall glass of orange juice; she started for the living room, but when she reached the doorway, she stopped at the threshold. Stella had been rummaging through the hall closet, searching for her black boots, but she’d found something else instead. Now she sat cross-legged on the floor examining the box that had arrived from Unity. A very bad start to an enormously untrustworthy day.

  Jenny had thought she’d hidden the gift well, fitting the large packing crate neatly behind the jackets and coats. She had assumed there’d be no reason for Stella to look in the closet before Jenny found the opportunity to get rid of this birthday present, the way she’d gotten rid of all the others for the past thirteen years. Every time Elinor Sparrow had sent a gift, Jenny had destroyed it before Stella could discover the gift and be won over. It made no difference if the box contained a doll or a sweater, a music box or a book; anything with a Unity postmark was sent down to the incinerator. But now the past had reached out to them, drawing them back to everything Jenny had left behind. Why, on this morning she wouldn’t have been surprised to find a snapping turtle in her own bathroom sink, or a mud puddle under the hall carpeting, perhaps even a memento from the museum of pain carefully wrapped in tissue paper and twine, fallen into her daughter’s hands. There was no way to stop this now: Stella had already pulled off the tape. Packing niblets had spilled onto the carpet.

  “Well, well,” Stella said, in a tone that included delight and fury at the very same time.

  Inside the box was Jenny’s toy house, the one her father had made for her, an exact replica of Cake House, with all three chimneys set in place. There was the garden gate, painted a freckled green, and the birds’ nests, formed of sticks and string, positioned above the porch. There was the forsythia and the hedge of laurel, with tiny felt leaves glued to each wavering branch and eve
n tinier bees fashioned out of satin and cherry stones, clinging to the pale, gauzy blossoms.

  “When were you going to show this to me?” The packing stuff clung to the skirt of Stella’s uniform in white puffballs. “Never?”

  Jenny’s father, Saul, had spent a full year building the house, but after he died, she never played with it again. The miniature house went from a shelf in her bedroom to a corner in the parlor to a storeroom in the cellar, and there it had moldered for years. Now, someone had cleaned the floors with a toothbrush. The rugs had been washed; the kitchen table, whittled out of local pine, was shiny with furniture wax. It was lemon oil, Jenny realized, a scent which reminded her of her father and often caused her to cry.

  Stella lifted the model of Cake House onto the trestle table in the hall.

  “Did you plan to destroy it, like you have everything else my grandmother’s sent me?”

  Jenny took a step backward, as though she’d been slapped. There were tears in her eyes, brought on by the lemon oil. She opened her mouth to try to explain herself, but there were no excuses. Just as Stella had suspected. No reason at all, other than selfish pride.

  “Don’t tell me you thought I didn’t know.” Red spots had appeared on Stella’s cheeks. Had she grown overnight? Had she always looked quite so adult? So extremely self-righteous? “How stupid do you think I am? I’ve known since my seventh birthday. I followed you down the hall and watched you throw my present into the incinerator chute.”